Julia Spencer-Fleming - One Was a Soldier

She shook her head. “You have a problem, Eric. A serious, serious problem. You need help, and your little group isn’t cutting it. I don’t know if you need psychotherapy or drugs or what, but you find someone who can help you and you get yourself sorted out.” She gulped. “Or I’ll leave and take Jake with me.”

“What?”

“I’m not going to wait around for you to start beating on us, too.”

Her words took his breath away. His stomach ached and his chest was tight. “I would never, ever harm you or Jake. I love you. You two are my whole life.”

Her face fractured. “There was a time when you would have said the same thing about a suspect. That you’d never hurt anyone if you could help it.” She pressed her fingers against her mouth for a second. “You were always the most conscientious, sweet-natured man I knew. Sometimes you had to do hard things, but you never let them make you hard. I loved that about you.”

Loved that. Past tense. His gut knotted itself even tighter. “I just need some more time. To get my bearings again.”

“You’ve been home four months now. It’s getting worse, not better.” She stepped back. Looked around the room. Lifted Jake’s backpack off the desk. “Get help. Or I swear to God, I’m out of here.”

Clare had tried dropping by the Stuyvesant Inn, to see if she could meet with Arlene Seelye, but the two MPs had been out. She lingered as long as she could over her mother’s menu options, but there was only so much time she could kill debating brown sugar versus mustard glaze on the Virginia ham, and eventually she had to leave unsatisfied.

When she got home, she had a message on her machine. “Hey, it’s me. Are you there?… No? Huh. Look, I’m sorry. I know this whole thing with Tally McNabb has been hard on you. I shouldn’t have hammered on you like that. I’m flat out today-I gotta meet with the board of aldermen about Eric’s suspension-but maybe we can have lunch tomorrow? At the diner?”

She tried to reach him but had to settle for playing phone tag. Frustrated, she called her junior warden, Geoffrey Burns, Esq. Not about Russ-there was no love lost between the two men-but about Arlene Seelye. “She’s investigating a theft from the army,” Clare explained. “The suspect is dead, but her husband lives here, and Colonel Seelye thinks he knows something about the missing money. What does she do?”

“She’ll go to Judge Ryswick for a warrant.” Geoff didn’t hesitate. “She’ll want to search the house and, based on what she finds there, any accounts that might be in either spouse’s name or further locations, like a second home, cars, boats.”

“Can she arrest the husband?”

“As an accessory? Possibly. She might get the Feds involved. Undoubtedly, your fiancé as well, since the guy’s in his jurisdiction. Are you sure you want to marry him?”

“Yes.” Despite their disagreement over Tally McNabb. “And I expect you to at least pretend to have a good time at the reception.”

Next, she phoned Assistant District Attorney Amy Nguyen. She had met the woman just enough times to justify calling her on a fishing expedition. Unfortunately, Amy hadn’t seen anyone fitting Seelye’s description at the courthouse, and she hadn’t heard anything about a possible arrest involving the FBI in their area.

That evening, she sat for a long time with one of the sleeping pills Trip had prescribed in one hand, and a highball glass full of Macallan’s in the other. I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t.

He’s not going to spring a blood test on me the day after I got the prescription filled.

She chased the pill down with a long swallow of Scotch.

Wednesday morning, she told herself the same thing when she popped two Dexedrine. It’s too soon for a blood test. The familiar jittery rush of heat went through her when the pills hit her system, and she thought, Okay. I can get through today. She wouldn’t be tempted to drink before early evening, and she’d burn that bridge when she got to it.

It was a relentlessly busy morning; a 7:00 A.M. Eucharist, a stack of phone calls to get through, then a sermon to draft. She struggled with it; Sunday’s gospel was Matthew, the Great Commandment, but her attention kept circling back to the beginning of the passage. One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. It brought back the nightmare she had had, with her old SERE instructor quoting scripture at her while Russ’s body burned.

She was grateful when Lois, the church secretary, interrupted her. “Your mother phoned. She asked me to tell you the florist is coming over this afternoon to look at the space and take measurements.” Clare had taken to letting Lois handle as many maternal calls as possible. The secretary actually seemed to enjoy debating the virtues of tulle versus netting for the sugared-almond favor bags. “Magnolia swags and gold-sprayed live oak,” Lois went on. “Very romantic.”

“For Tidewater Virginia in June. Too bad I’m getting married in November in the North Country.” Clare looked down at her crossed-out paragraphs and scribbled notes. “I guess I’m not going to be able to leave until after I’ve spoken to the florist. If I get a call from a Colonel Arlene Seelye, will you keep her on the line and track me down?”

“I will.” Lois retreated down the hall, humming “Here Comes the Bride.”

“No Lohengrin !” Clare shouted.

Her practice of writing her sermon on Wednesday served two functions: It gave her enough time between then and Sunday to come up with something else if her first try was crap, and it made her positively happy to have her solitude broken by the lunchtime vestry meeting.

This week’s meeting was brisk. Twenty minutes to cover Gail Jones’s education budget and the feasibility of an energy audit; forty minutes of Clare listening to Terry McKellan and Norm Madsen and Mrs. Marshall waxing on about their own nuptials. It was sweet and charming, and it made her uncomfortably aware that Russ had been part of this club, too, long married and happy to be so.

Clearly, I should keep out of your business. Like Linda did. God, she was an idiot. As if Russ needed a reminder of the difference between Clare and his late wife. His beloved wife.

She was cleaning up after the meeting when Glenn Hadley stuck his head in the door. “Summun in the sanctuary to see you, Father.”

She was always “Father” to the sexton. She handed him a tray loaded with uneaten sandwiches. “Thanks, Mr. Hadley. Would you put this in the icebox downstairs?”

“Ayuh.”

She sniffed. “Were you smoking?” The sexton’s granddaughter, Hadley Knox, had enlisted Clare’s help in keeping the seventy-six-year-old diabetic away from cigarettes.

“Me, Father? You know the doctors told me not to.”

She rolled her eyes as she walked down the hall toward the church. Short of following him around all day, she didn’t know how anyone could keep the old fellow from indulging. She switched on the nave lights and hauled the oak door open. If a heart attack and a quadruple bypass couldn’t convince him to-

Quentan Nichols was standing in the center aisle.

Clare froze. Behind her, the heavy door whispered closed. Despite the soaring space, the thick stone walls of St. Alban’s seemed to close in around her. Lois was running errands on her lunch hour. Mr. Hadley was in the undercroft. No one would hear her if she screamed.

Nichols took a step toward her. Frowned. She tensed, ready to bolt for the hall.

“Major Fergusson?” His voice was uncertain. He took another step toward her. “I mean, Reverend Fergusson?”